The invention relates to a method according to the preamble of claim 1. Present-day consumer products, such as for example television sets, and the like, get implemented with many user features, that must individually as well as collectively be rendered accessible to a user person through an appropriate graphical user interface. Now, a graphical user interface in the first place contains graphical objects that may include items like buttons, sliders, hotspots, and indicators of various kinds such as icons and text. Further elements of such interface are functional objects that link the graphical objects to an associated underlying functionality. The graphical objects are represented by so-called widget components that contain the facilities and restrictions of the underlying display hardware. An example of such widget may have properties like "backgroundcolour", events like "clicked" and methods like "redraw". The functional objects are represented by so-called control components. An example is a tuner component, having properties like "maximumfrequency", events like "channelfound", and methods like "setchannelnumber".
Now for constructing a graphical user interface in an effective and efficient manner, it is necessary to have available a well-defined design environment that provides a true likeness (WYSIWYG) of the eventual imagery on the display of the product. To build such an environment for a particular graphic IC is expensive, and moreover, may be targeted to an uncertain realization. With respect to the target platform, the defining of features of the display hardware is nowadays realized through embedded and callable library software. Such libraries may in time be frequently amended in successive versions of the display hardware in question or in replacement types for that display.
To be able to define the coupling between the two categories of component, the designer of an application should know the application programming interface (API) of the control components. This interface could be defined by various different economic entities in the manufacturing column and may not be uniform in time. Both widget components and control components on the target platform are generally defined in a general purpose language like C that has a relatively low degree of abstraction.
Therefore, implementation of graphical user interfaces directly on the target is time-consuming and costly. Now there exist generic platforms like the PC, that allow the running of various relatively higher abstracted programming environments such as Microsoft Visual Basic that are well suited for creating graphical user interfaces on that platform. Nowadays more and more of those generic development environments are used for constructing graphical user interfaces on specific hardware. In that case communication to the host platform (the PC) of the facilities and restrictions of the target platform is crucial.